Editorial standards

CorpStart operates from 641 Kingston Rd, Pickering, ON L1V 3N7. It is a document preparation and filing service. It is not a law firm and not an accounting firm, and nothing on this site is legal or tax advice.

That boundary is not a disclaimer bolted to the bottom of a page. It decides what we will and will not publish, and what we will and will not sell. We file what registries accept from a filing agent. Where a question needs a lawyer or an accountant, the honest answer is to say so rather than to answer it well enough to sound useful.

Questions, corrections and complaints go to [email protected], and a correction is welcome even when it is inconvenient for us.

Every government fee, municipal licence fee and statutory deadline on this site is read from the authority that sets it: the ministry's own fee schedule, the municipality's own by-law or rates document, or the statute itself. We do not take a figure from a competitor's page, a directory, or a summary written by someone else, because a number repeated from a secondary source carries that source's mistakes and none of its context.

Across the licensing pages that means 70 municipal licence records covering 23 municipalities. 70 of those 70 carry a link to the document the fee was read from, and 70 carry the date a person last checked it. The most recent check on this site was 2026-09-16.

Fees change, usually in January, and a page that hides when it was written is asking you to trust a number with no expiry. Each record shows both the date the schedule takes effect and the date we last looked, so you can judge for yourself how stale it might be. Where a fee comes from a schedule older than our last check, the answer says so rather than presenting it as this year's price.

We record the gap instead of filling it. 13 of the 70 licence records publish no fee, because the municipality does not publish one where an applicant can find it. Those records say exactly that and name the licence anyway, which is more useful than an estimate and far less likely to cost someone money.

This is the rule that costs us the most content. An invented or averaged figure would let every table look complete, and it would be repeated as fact long after anyone could trace where it came from. A recorded gap is worth more than a filled one.

The same applies to claims about the law. Where a statement rests on a statute, we cite the section, so a reader who doubts it can check it in minutes. Where a question turns on facts we cannot see, such as whether a particular tax rule applies to a particular company, we say that it turns on those facts rather than guessing at the answer the reader hopes for.

Most published errors are not written deliberately. They are true when written and stop being true later, or they are fixed in one place and left standing in three others. A correction that relies on everybody remembering it is a correction with a short life.

So the rules that matter are enforced by automated tests that run before anything ships. A retired price cannot reappear in prose anywhere on the site. A claim we have established is wrong, such as a federal corporation removing the need to register in a province, fails the build if it is written again. A municipality cannot be described as the cheapest unless the data agrees. A licence sold in two-year terms cannot be described as annual. A price shown to a customer must be the price the checkout charges.

This page is held to the same standard. The counts above are computed from the data every time the page is built, so if the underlying records change, the page changes with them rather than drifting into a claim about a state of affairs that has passed.

We do not publish reviews, testimonials or ratings that we cannot evidence, and we do not present a location we do not operate from.

We do not tell you that incorporating will save you tax. Whether it does depends on eligibility rules with real conditions attached, and a page that promises the result without the conditions is selling something it cannot deliver.

We do not advertise a price that a cart later increases. The figure quoted is the service fee, the government fee is shown separately at cost, and sales tax is charged on the service fee only at the rate of your own province. If you find a page on this site where those three things are not true, that is a defect and we would like to hear about it.